Oh gosh, finally news that's got nothing to do with patents or smartphones or the comparing of male sexual organs. Haiku news! Michael Lotz has added preliminary support for WPA to Haiku, taking the first steps towards making the Haiku wireless stack a lot more useful.

Hopelessly, really? What are these amazing desktop OS developments which Haiku is hopelessly behind on?

Alas, with todays extremely fast advances in hardware, useful OS's is not in the realm of small projects and tiny means.

Extremely fast advances in hardware? Haiku is x86 only and yet it can run on modern cpu's from intel and amd. Opposite to your statement I see more and more consolidation rather than variety in hardware which means that there is less and less hardware you need to support. Note that I am talking about the desktop here, which is what Haiku is targeting.

Hardware accelerated 2d/3d graphics is certainly lacking, however this will likely be solved with gallium eventually.

I'd say software is Haiku's largest achilles heel. Not only is native software is extremely scarce but there's not a whole lot of ports for anything other than games. That is NOT an unsurmountable obstacle though as there is nothing technical preventing Haiku from enjoying ports of strong open source applications, just the lack of time/know-how amongst current porters. Applications like full-fledged browsers (Firefox/Chrome), productivity apps like LibreOffice, Abiword, Inkscape, etc. would quickly make Haiku alot more viable for day to day use.

Hopefully Haiku will attract more developers as users as that will likely pay off when it comes to Haiku's software repertoire, which also (I hope) means native software as it has a better chance of highlighting Haiku's strengths.